Social networks’ unnoticed influence on body image in Spanish university students

Examining Factors Influencing COVID-19 Vaccine Tourism for International Tourists

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on global tourism. Vaccine tourism is a novel health tourism concept, which provides an opportunity for countries with a vaccine surplus to offer medical tourism packages to entice international tourists from countries with vaccine shortages to visit for sightseeing and receive vaccine inoculations. Understanding the factors that influence people to adopt vaccine tourism is one of the strategies that could boost a country’s tourism sector and help to revive the local economy. This study aims to examine the factors influencing the intention to adopt and recommend COVID-19 vaccine tourism among young travelers. A total of 179 questionnaire surveys were collected from traveling-related social media outlets. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was performed to analyze the data. The results indicate that young tourists in Thailand are inclined to promote vaccine tourism to others. Price value appears to be the most significant influencing factor on intentions to both adopt and recommend vaccine tourism. Additionally, trust in the foreign healthcare system was positively associated with young travelers’ intention to recommend vaccine tourism to others. Theoretically, this research adds to the medical tourism literature, suggesting that, while trust is an important factor influencing the medical tourism decision, it appears to be insignificant in the context of vaccine tourism.

Gender Differences in Healthy Lifestyle, Body Consciousness, and the Use of Social Networks among Medical Students

Background and Objectives: The goal of this survey was to identify the relationship between the level of satisfaction with body image, perceived health, and the usage of social media among freshmen medical university students. The influence of social media and peers was also related to body image. Materials and Methods: An online survey was distributed among freshmen healthcare students. The questionnaire collected sociodemographic, anthropometric data, and information about students’ perception about healthy lifestyle using open-ended questions, as well as their opinion about the importance of perfect body image and the level of satisfaction with their physical appearance. Questions focusing on the use of social media and the relationship with body image collected data on the use of social networks and how they affect students’ opinion about their own body image. Psychometric data were also gathered using the Body Consciousness Scale. For the statistical analysis, QSR NUD*IST (Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing) Vivo 12 was used for qualitative data and IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Statistics for Windows, version 23 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) was used for descriptive and comparative results. Results: In total, 77 students aged 20.09 ± 2.47 years, of which the majority were women (75.30%), were included in the survey. The use of social network was about 4.81 ± 3.60 h/day. Facebook was the most used social networking site (94.80%), followed by Instagram (92.20%), Snapchat (16.90%), WhatsApp (15.60%), and TikTok (10.40%). The most common reason for using these sites was socialization. We found that 64.90% of healthcare students were normal weight. The main barriers for having a healthy lifestyle, as they were perceived by students, were the busy schedule and the lack of time needed to prepare healthy meals, lack of motivation, and lack of money. Women scored higher for the Private Body Consciousness and Public Body Consciousness scales. The main aspects related to a healthy lifestyle referred to physical activity, consumption of fruit and vegetables, water consumption, and a good quality of sleep. Gender differences were discussed as well. Conclusions: The results illustrated the complexity of the relationship between social media and body image and the need to prevent body image concerns, especially in young women.

Buying-shopping disorder, emotion dysregulation, coping and materialism: a comparative approach with gambling patients and young people and adolescents

OBJECTIVE

The comorbidity between gambling disorder (GD) and buying-shopping disorder (BSD) has led to explore the core features that could be interacting between them. The main aim of this study was to examine the differences in both conditions considering emotion dysregulation, coping and materialism, as well as the relationship between these variables and their interaction with age and sex.

METHODS

A community sample (n = 281 adolescents) and a sample of individuals with GD (n = 31) was compared. Both samples were split into a group with BSD and a group without it.

RESULTS

The prevalence of participants who met the criteria for BSD was higher in the GD sample than in the community sample; the GD sample also presented higher values in the psychological variables studied. In the community sample group, positive associations were found between BSD severity and materialism and emotion dysregulation levels. In the GD sample, BSD severity was higher for participants who reported higher levels in materialism and lower scores in coping strategies. Variables impacted BSD severity differently according to sex and age covariates.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of the interaction of the variables could be useful to design prevention and treatment approaches addressed to specific groups of age and sex. KEY POINTS Buying-shopping disorder (BSD) has been compared in clinical and community samples. The clinical sample was constituted by Gambling disorder (GD) patients. The variables emotion dysregulation, coping and materialism have been considered. Variables impacted BSD severity differently according to sex and age covariates.

The Higher Education Sustainability through Virtual Laboratories: The Spanish University as Case of Study

Education has been integrated into the globalization process supported by technological advances such as e-learning. The sustainability of the universities is one of the key points of the university survival, and they strongly depend on the number of students that can enroll in them. Thus, many of the educational institutions have had to develop their curricula based on the use new technologies. Without a doubt, virtual laboratories are the latest technology in this regard. The objective of this work is to determine which are the main institutions and research trends in relation to virtual laboratories. The methodology followed in this research was to perform a bibliometric analysis of the whole scientific production indexed in Scopus. The world’s scientific production has been analysed in the following domains: first the trend over time, types of publications and countries, second the main subjects and keywords, third main institutions and their main topics, and fourth the main journals and proceedings that publish on this topic. After that, a case study was analysed in detailed as a representative country (Spain). The most productive institution in this field, Universidad de Educación a Distancia (UNED). If the ranking is established by average citations per published paper, the first three institutions are from the USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Washington (Seattle), and Carnegie Mellon University. The scientific categories at world level and in the case of study are similar. First, there is the field of engineering followed by computer science and above all it highlights the wide spectrum of branches of knowledge in which this topic is published, which indicates the great acceptance of this teaching methodology in all fields of education. Finally, community detection has been applied to the case study and six clusters have been found: Virtual Reality, Users, E-learning, Programming, Automatic-robotics, Computer Simulation and Engineering Education. As a main conclusion, bibliographic analysis confirms that research in virtual laboratories is a very active field, where scientific productivity has exponentially increased over recent years in tandem with universities growth. Therefore, expectations are high in this field for the near future. The possibility of virtual laboratories opens up new perspectives for higher education sustainability, where the educational policies of countries could be reoriented.